


Irreversible

by Nicnac



Series: Immutable [2]
Category: Smallville
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-31
Updated: 2012-03-31
Packaged: 2017-11-02 20:17:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/372969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nicnac/pseuds/Nicnac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You could come up with a million reasons why it occurs to you today.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Irreversible

You could come up with a million reasons why it occurs to you today. Given enough time you could probably even come up with a few that sound realistic. You’ve never gotten any better at lying to others, no matter how much you have to do it, but you’ve become remarkably good at self-delusion. 

Today, though, you’re going to be honest. The truth is there is no reason the thought should have occurred to you now, and today is just another ordinary day in Metropolis.

You realize, with a suddenness that is belied by how comfortable the knowledge sits in your head, like it’s been there all along, two things. He was never as evil as you made him out to be back then, and you were a horrible friend.

This is how it happened:

You lied to him, often and obviously. You flaunted your secret and then refused to be honest about it. It wasn’t deliberate, but it did happen.

He would often go to great lengths to please you and you never really appreciated it. But then, you didn’t really understand how much work some of the favors he did for you took.

You never shared your secrets with him, but you rarely granted him the same privacy. When you found him prying into your secrets you got angry until he apologized for being nosy. When he found you prying into his secrets you got angry until he apologized for being dishonest. 

One time he walked into a room filled with potentially explosive gas, scared school children, and a crazed gunman. He traded his life for all of yours and you never thanked him for that. You don’t think anybody did.

You got angry at him for researching anything that might be related to your secret. This seemed fair to you, since he promised not to research you anymore. It never occurred to you that there really wasn’t any way he could know that studying meteor rocks and aliens was equivalent to breaking his promise.

He got knocked unconscious enough to cause a normal person brain damage. You caused at least one concussion yourself, personally and deliberately. You never apologized.

There were a lot of people that told you that he wasn’t trustworthy, but you insisted that you didn’t believe them.

You stopped really trusting him long before he proved them right.

You prioritized your secret over his physical wellbeing, and then his mental wellbeing. You convinced yourself that you were trying to protect him.

You told him that his father would have loved him if he had tried harder. You knew what his father was like for most of his life, and the fact the he had just killed him was no excuse. There is no excuse for what you said. 

He was probably more paranoid with poor social skills than evil most of the time. That doesn’t make what he did right, but throwing tantrums at him and giving morally righteous lectures probably weren’t the best forms of therapy either.

He tried to kill you because he thought it was right. You wanted to kill him, even though you knew it was wrong.

He was a horrible friend in some ways too, but as his first friend, you probably taught him a lot of it yourself.

You have since learned a lot about blame and you know that what happened was not your fault, really. This does not change the fact that you could have done something to prevent it.

You consider all this with the grave and serious air you feel it deserves, before resolutely filing it away in your brain as “interesting, but irrelevant.”

Whatever he was before, he is evil now, and tomorrow, much like today, will be just another ordinary day in Metropolis.


End file.
